This chapter and Chapter 3 give Access database developers like you a summary of core Visual Basic .NET programming topics that you are likely to use in your applications. While Chapter 3 presents traditional topics, this chapter focuses on topics that are new or substantially revised in the .NET Framework. Developers have long requested the class inheritance feature because of its ability to facilitate code reuse. If you understood the class programming topics that Chapter 3 covers, you should have little difficulty appreciating how useful this concept will be in your Visual Basic .NET applications. To help you understand the value of class inheritance, this chapter presents class inheritance samples that use the Northwind database. Other concepts discussed in this chapter include file processing, event handling, and structured exception handling ”a new style of run-time error processing.